DVD 'Hacker' Pleads Not Guilty in Piracy Appeal
Inger Sethov
OSLO (Reuters) - A Norwegian who defeated Hollywood on piracy charges pleaded not guilty on Tuesday in a landmark appeal hearing that the movie industry is anxious to win to protect its lucrative DVD business.
Prosecutors, on behalf of major U.S. film studios, will try to prove that 20-year-old Jon Johansen broke Norwegian law when he developed and distributed a computer program that enables consumers to make personal copies of their DVDs.
The industry hopes to send a message to hackers that it will fight on any turf those who crack into their copy-protection systems in a global crackdown on piracy.
The plaintiffs, the Motion Picture Association of America -- representing Hollywood studios like Walt Disney Co., Universal Studios and Warner Bros -- estimate that piracy costs the U.S. motion picture industry $3 billion annually in lost sales.
The case in the Oslo Appeals Court is set to end on December 12 with a verdict expected in early 2004.
Johansen was dubbed "DVD-Jon" by the Internet community after he devised a computer program -- DeCSS -- in the late 1990s that enabled consumers to circumvent copy- protection technology embedded in ordinary DVDs.
Johansen was cleared of piracy charges in an Oslo court in January after a six-day trial, billed as a fight between a cyber David and corporate Goliaths.
The court ruled that Johansen could do whatever he wanted to DVDs he had legally purchased. The court also said prosecutors had failed to give evidence that Johansen's program had been used by others to copy and distribute pirated copies.
The prosecution this time intends to establish that Johansen broke the law when he cracked the copy-protection code on DVDs.
State prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde, who lodged the appeal objecting to the court's application of the law and the presentation of evidence, said: "The core of this case is the use of DeCSS in connection with legally purchased films...not on pirated copies."
Johansen, who developed the program when he was 15, has become a hero for hackers worldwide who say making software like DeCSS is an act of intellectual freedom.
Media and software executives argue rampant digital piracy threatens their livelihoods and creates a need for stronger technological stop-gaps like digital rights management software to stop unauthorized copies of compact discs and DVDs.
The introduction of such technologies has triggered a showdown between copyright holders and consumer rights advocates who say such technologies rob individuals of the ability to make legitimate back-up copies of what they buy.
"If Johansen's acquittal is overturned on appeal, it will become illegal for Norwegians to bypass DVD region code restrictions or technical restrictions that prevent fast-forwarding over advertisements or otherwise circumvent digital controls on their own property," said executive director Robin Gross of consumer advocacy group IP Justice in a statement.
There is no specific legislation in Norway to protect digital content. A European Union copyright directive gives individual countries the right to choose if they want to recognize legal protections for new digital rights management technologies.
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle...toryID=3923240
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ACLU Takes On UNC Student's Music Case
Eric Ferreri
CHAPEL HILL -- A UNC student's entanglement with a music industry watchdog group has attracted the notice of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU is now representing the UNC student, whose identity is undisclosed but is being sought by the Recording Industry Association of America.
The RIAA issued a subpoena in October charging that the student has made nine copyrighted songs available for download on the Internet, using a UNC computer
connection to do so.
Last week, the ACLU filed a motion in federal district court in Greensboro on the student's behalf to quash the RIAA's subpoena, which seeks the student's personal information.
Attorneys from the ACLU's national office in Washington, D.C., and the local chapter in North Carolina are teaming up to tackle the case, said Aden Fine, the national office's staff attorney.
The ACLU's interest stems from what it perceives as a violation of the unnamed student's constitutional rights to privacy and anonymous use of the Internet. By requesting the student's name and contact information before proving any legal wrongdoing, the RIAA is violating the student's rights, Fine said.
"We don't support copyright infringement in any manner," he said. "Our motion is about due process rights. The Constitution and the First Amendment protects the right to engage in anonymous speech and that includes anonymous speech on the Internet."
Though it hasn't yet been determined whether the law has been violated, the student's access to the university's computer system has been blocked.
That means the student can't log in to the university's computer system from a personal computer. He or she may still use the Internet or e-mail from public computer terminals on campus.
Suspending the student's computer access is standard procedure, said David Parker, a UNC attorney. Generally, a student notified of a potential violation like this can regain access to the university computer system by filling out what is known as a "counter notice" form, which is essentially a response to the charge.
The student has not done so in this case and thus is still unable to tap into the university computer system from his personal computer, Parker said.
"It was kind of an odd situation," he said, speaking generically and not confirming the gender of the student. "Given that the individual didn't want his identity revealed, he didn't fill out a counter notice."
The ACLU's motion attacks parts of the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a statute created in 1998 designed to address an increasingly complex digital world.
The civil-liberties group argues that the act doesn't offer enough legal shelter to people who wish to remain anonymous, saying it so lacks those protections that it is "an invitation to mistake and misuse."
In the case of the UNC student, it would be unfair to make a public identification until some wrongdoing was proven, Fine argued.
"All there is, is an allegation," he said. "Alleged copyright infringement still deserves First Amendment protection."
For now, UNC is in a bit of a holding pattern. If ordered to, the university will provide personal information on the person, Parker said.
"We just have to see how it plays out," he said. "We'll do whatever the court says we have to do. The university is, in this situation, essentially an Internet service provider. When potential violators of copyright or other laws are brought to our attention, we deal with it."
As of October, the recording industry had filed 80 more federal lawsuits around the country against computer users it said were illegally sharing music files across the Internet.
The group previously filed lawsuits against 261 others. It had reached settlements with 156 people.
File sharing is a particularly popular pastime on college campuses because students have access to high-powered university computers and, generally, have an interest in music.
http://www.herald-sun.com/orange/10-419897.html
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Microsoft Decries Overseas Longhorn Rustling
Reuters
Malaysia's brazen software pirates are hawking the next version of Microsoft Windows operating system years before it is supposed to be on sale.
Underscoring the scale of U.S. companies' copyright problems in Asia, CDs containing software that Microsoft has code-named Longhorn are on sale for 6 ringgit ($1.58) in southern Malaysia. Microsoft's current version of Windows, XP, sells for more than $100 in the United States.
The software is an early version of Longhorn demonstrated and distributed at a conference for Microsoft programmers in Los Angeles in October, Microsoft Corporate Attorney Jonathan Selvasegaram told Reuters.
"It's not a ready product," he said from Malaysia. "Even if it works for a while, I think it's very risky" to install on a home computer, he said.
Chairman Bill Gates has said that Longhorn, which is not expected to be released for several years yet, would rank as Microsoft's largest software launch this decade.
The software is on sale in the largest shopping complex in Johor Bahru, the Malaysian city bordering Singapore, alongside thousands of pirated programs, music CDs and DVDs. Discs in plastic covers hang from racks in more than a dozen specialized stores in the Holiday Plaza center, even though it has its own police station.
Such piracy is rampant in Asia, although the United States praised Malaysia for seizing thousands of illegal discs since May. U.S. trade losses due to piracy in Malaysia fell to $242 million last year from $316 million in 2001.
Selvasegaram said pirates would shut their shops whenever Malaysian authorities launched a clampdown, only to reopen within days or even hours. He said software companies were working with the authorities on the problem, but the police were more concerned about controlling pornography.
Longhorn promises new methods of storing files, tighter links to the Internet, greater security and fewer reboots, Microsoft has said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-5112229.html
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Diebold Drops Legal Case Against Speech Advocates
In a major victory for free speech enthusiasts on the Internet, Diebold Inc. has agreed not to sue voting rights advocates who publish leaked documents about the alleged security breaches of electronic voting.
A Diebold attorney promised in a conference call Monday with U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel that it would not sue dozens of students, computer scientists and ISP operators who received cease-and-desist letters from August to October.
Diebold also promised not to file lawsuits against two Swarthmore College students and a San Francisco-based Internet service provider for copyright infringement, according to a motion that company attorneys filed Nov. 24 in San Jose's federal court.
Diebold did not disclose specifics on why it had dropped its legal case, but the decision is a major reversal of the company's previous strategy. North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold, which controls more than 50,000 touch-screen voting machines nationwide, had threatened legal action against dozens of individuals who refused to remove links to its stolen data.
``This is a huge victory that shows we have weapons on our side to protect free speech from overbearing copyright laws so that the Internet remains a forum for public discussion,'' said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Wendy Seltzer, who represents the students and the San Francisco-based Internet service provider, Online Policy Group. ``We're trying to hammer home that you can't go around making idle threats that aren't backed up by the law.''
Diebold spokesman David Bear emphasized Monday that while the company had dropped its case, it will continue to monitor the online proliferation of the leaked documents, and may file lawsuits against others who publish the data.
``We certainly reserve our right to protect our proprietary information in future cases,'' Bear said.
Diebold's battle began in March, when a hacker broke into the company's servers using an employee's ID number, and copied a 1.8-gigabyte file of company announcements, software bulletins and internal e-mails dating to January 1999.
The vast majority of the file included banal employee e-mails, software manuals and old voter record files. But several items raise security concerns about electronic voting that voting rights advocates have been trying to publicize for more than a year.
In one series of e-mails, a senior engineer dismissed concern from a lower-level programmer who questioned why Diebold lacked certification for the operating system in touch-screen voting machines. The Federal Election Commission requires such software to be certified by independent researchers.
In another e-mail, an executive scolded programmers for leaving software files on an Internet site without password protection.
In August, the hacker e-mailed data to voting activists, who published the information on their Web logs. Wired News published an online story. The documents have been widely circulated.
Seltzer said free speech advocates should hail Diebold's promise not to sue, but she warned that numerous individuals have already removed the offending material from Web sites.
EFF plans to continue with its case against Diebold, arguing under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that Diebold must pay damages for intimidating Internet service providers. The hearing is scheduled for Feb. 9.
``The implicit threat was, 'If you don't take this material down, we might sue,''' Seltzer said. ``Without them ever needing to file a federal complaint, they got these documents taken down from a huge number of sites. It was a chill on free speech that stopped discussion of electronic voting issues without ever getting before a judge.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/7389899.htm
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How Much Is Privacy Worth?
Ryan Singel
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday over whether the federal government should reimburse individuals whose sensitive data was disclosed illegally, even if no harm can be proven.
At issue before the court, according to privacy advocates, is how valuable privacy really is.
The Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the government from disclosing private information intentionally, without the individual's consent, and provides for a $1,000 minimum fine if the individual is "adversely affected."
In the case, known as Doe v. Chao, to be argued Wednesday, the Department of Labor distributed the Social Security number of a coal miner who was appealing for black lung benefits.
Since 1969, the Labor Department has used miners' Social Security numbers as their case numbers on documents shared with coal companies, insurance companies and lawyers for all sides. Those documents also were published in court filings that later ended up in legal databases.
In 1997, seven anonymous coal miners sued, alleging the government had flagrantly violated the Privacy Act and put them at risk of identity theft.
Only one of those miners, known as Buck Doe, prevailed in the original case, winning $1,000 by arguing that he suffered emotional distress from the fear that the data leak would lead to identity theft. The government, arguing that the plaintiff needed to show real injury, appealed the decision to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and won.
Buck Doe argues that the leak itself causes enough distress to warrant an automatic penalty, even if the information leak never leads to financial harm.
Marcia Hoffman, staff counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed a friend of the court brief (PDF) supporting the anonymous miner, argues that Congress preset the penalty precisely because it is so hard to put a price on an abstract concept such as privacy or to prove damages in absence of others' misuse of that data.
"If your Social Security number is disclosed, there is a real potential harm from identity theft," Hoffman said.
Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, which was one of many organizations that cosigned EPIC's brief, argues that the outcome of the case will have implications beyond the Privacy Act and could affect future privacy legislation.
"The outcome of this case will make a general statement about how we value privacy in the United States today," Schwartz said. "If someone rummages through all your stuff, nothing's taken, but they find out information about you, (yet) you can't show actual damages.
"Yet something intangible has been taken from you, and what do we do to make up for that as a society?" asked Schwartz. "It seems clear to us from the history of the Privacy Act that Congress at that time wanted people to be compensated even for intangible harm."
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,61439,00.html
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Microsoft Nets Pirate Reseller
MICROSOFT has successfully sued a Sydney computer retailer for loading PCs it was selling with illegal copies of Windows.
Big Ben Computer, based in the Sydney suburb of Strathfield, paid $55,000 in compensation to Microsoft after being sued in the Federal Court.
Microsoft said it was the second time Big Ben, registered in the name of Mr Ben Zhong Fan, had been sued for loading unlicensed software, having paid $10,000 in damages to Microsoft in 2001 in a copyright violation settlement.
Microsoft said investigations into the most recent breach began in May 2001. Civil proceedings began in July last year. A trial had been set down for October 2003, but Big Ben elected to settle before the trial commenced, Microsoft said.
Microsoft warned consumers against buying illegal copies of Windows, saying pirated products were not eligible for support or upgrades.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html
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Peer-to-Peer Networks Targeted
Senators' letter asking tech companies to self-regulate garners mixed reaction.
Rita Chang,
A letter from six U.S. senators urging peer-to-peer technology vendors to take "common sense" steps to deter the downloading of copyrighted content and pornography is drawing mixed reactions.
Critics claim that the fingerprints of copyright-holders--the recording industry in particular--are all over the letter. The letter's backers don't deny the charge.
The letter, dated November 12, 2003, bears the signatures of three Democratic and three Republican senators. It asks seven peer-to-peer vendors to post warnings alerting users that downloading unauthorized copyrighted content is illegal. It also suggests the vendors use filters to block unauthorized copyrighted content and pornography, and asks them to change their software's settings so that users don't automatically share their files with others on a peer-to- peer network.
Who Wrote It?
The senators' message bears an uncanny resemblance to a September 30 news release issued by the Recording Industry Association of America, according to Wayne Rosso, president of peer- to-peer company Blubster. The RIAA's release calls on the peer-to-peer industry to "finally act like responsible corporate citizens," and requests many of the same actions.
"We have been in discussion with the RIAA," says Kevin Bishop, a spokesperson for Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who spearheaded the letter-writing initiative. Graham is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has held numerous hearings on piracy and copyright issues this year.
The RIAA supports the senators, says Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chair and CEO. The senators "are placing the onus squarely where it should be--on the P2P networks and their role in inducing computers users to break the law," Bainwol says.
The industry already is taking some steps urged by the senators, says Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a trade group representing five companies that received the letter. When the group formed about three months ago, the organization immediately established a code of conduct that addresses the issues raised in the senators' letter, he says.
Still, despite their best efforts, vendors can't control what users do with their software, Eisgrau says.
"There is no magic switch for vendors to stop users from downloading copyrighted content," Eisgrau says. "The Internet can be used and misused for hundreds if not thousands of purposes that are outside the control of software developers--or for that matter, ISPs. We don't hold the Post Office responsible for blackmailers and no ink producers have been accused of extortion."
Even though peer-to-peer networks can be used for piracy, the law allows companies to manufacture and distribute technologies that have "substantial noninfringing uses," Eisgrau says. This point was highlighted nearly 20 years ago in the legal squabble between the movie industry and Betamax, which manufactured video recorders. According to Eisgrau, similarities between that case and the current controversy over peer-to-peer systems could help establish that peer-to-peer vendors are on solid legal ground, he says.
Eisgrau also notes that peer-to-peer technology is still young and has potential use in a wide array of disciplines, from scientific research to education. The U.S. Army is distributing its videogame recruiting tool on Gnutella's file-sharing network, LimeWire, as Forbes magazine recently reported, he says. Other government agencies, including NASA, the Department of Defense, and the Naval Research Library, have used peer-to- peer computing software.
Eisgrau says that he welcomes the senators' letter "as a great opportunity to correct the record." But in his view the officials are "laboring under significant misunderstandings."
Alan Davidson of the Center for Democracy and Technology agrees with Eisgrau's assessment, calling the letter a mixed bag.
Davidson welcomes the call for self-regulation, saying that demands for government oversight, if heeded, could stifle the technology's development. He also says that the proposal requiring users to opt in before they share their files could benefit peer-to-peer companies, by shifting copyright infringement liability away from them and onto users, he says.
Davidson does, however, object to one proposal in the letter: the bid for filtering. Adding a filtering mechanism would require companies to differentiate between what is and is not legal, he says.
"We're concerned about service providers' monitoring our networks," Davidson says. "We don't ask phone companies to monitor phone conversations to see if people are doing bad things."
Davidson also criticizes the senators' preoccupation with pornography on peer-to-peer networks. "Conflating child pornography with adult pornography raises question marks," Davidson says, given that great majority of adult pornography is legal.
But raising the porn issue will get attention, notes one Capitol Hill copyright lawyer who declines to be identified. "The RIAA is using P2P as its political football, linking it to child porn as a way to get things passed," the attorney says.
Any link between peer-to-peer technology and pornography remains hotly contested. Earlier this year, in testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the General Accounting Office provided damning testimony on how peer-to-peer networks make pornography more accessible, particularly to young users.
More recently, however, in a November 13 letter to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who chairs that committee, the GAO stated that of the 62,000 tips received by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, only 1.4 percent are related to the Internet or to peer-to-peer networks. The agency notes that it does not know whether the center's reports accurately reflects the volume of child pornography on peer-to-peer networks or on the Internet.
Pornography on peer-to-peer networks is "not necessarily more dangerous" than pornography available through other online sources, the letter also noted.
Ultimately, the battleground may be in the courts. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in April that Grokster, a decentralized, file-sharing program, is not liable for copyright infringement, but the case is being appealed. Some observers expect the Supreme Court to review it.
Senators who joined Graham in signing the letter to peer-to-peer networks include Barbara Boxer (D-California), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Diane Feinstein (D-California), and Gordon Smith (R-Oregon). The letter requests a written response from the industry by December 15, 2003. P2P United declines to share its likely response before that deadline.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,113734,00.asp
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More Law Firms Turn To Extranets For File Sharing
Grant Buckler
When law firm Borden Ladner Gervais acted for ConocoPhillips Co. in a lengthy round of regulatory hearings related to the Alberta oil sands from late in 2001 through the first half of last year, the hearings generated thousands of pages of transcripts and exhibits.
But thanks to a computer extranet set up by the Calgary office of Borden Ladner Gervais, officials at ConocoPhillips, a Houston-based oil and gas firm, had access to those transcripts and exhibits within 24 hours, no matter where they were.
"That was a significant savings in having to find paper copies," says Randall Block, a Calgary-based partner with Borden Ladner Gervais.
Extranets -- private networks built on the same technology as the World Wide Web but restricted to access by limited groups of people -- have been popular in business since the late 1990s. Now they are also catching on in law firms, which have found that the large amounts of information they often need to share with clients make extranets very useful tools.
"We certainly have found that it's a good way to collaborate with our clients, particularly when you're doing a document-intensive transaction where you need to involve multiple parties in multiple time zones," says Scott Saundry, national director of technology for law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP.
Mr. Saundry says his firm has used extranets in client dealings for about two years, and that is increasing. His firm is not alone. "I would guess that most of the major firms are doing something in the extranet space," says Joel Alleyne, chief information officer and chief knowledge officer for Borden Ladner Gervais in Toronto.
And extranets aren't only for big firms, he adds. Take Fast & Corcoran, a two-lawyer Vancouver firm that specializes in aboriginal law.
Partner Larry Fast says his firm puts documents on a website, with access to individual files controlled by using passwords. This makes those documents accessible to clients, most of which are First Nations bands and many of which are in remote areas of British Columbia. It also allows Mr. Fast easy access to files from his notebook computer while he is travelling.
The small firm also uses extranet technology to share information with other firms when collaborating on projects, he adds. On land-claim cases, the firm works with researchers in Toronto and elsewhere; putting documents on-line is a convenient way to handle it.
In one case, a native delegation visiting Ottawa needed to update a presentation two hours before meeting a federal minister. Fast & Corcoran did the revisions in Vancouver, posted the documents on-line and the delegates printed them at their hotel. "I don't know how else you do things like that," Mr. Fast says.
The beauty of extranets is their ability to make large amounts of information accessible to many people at once, wherever they are. Before extranets, Mr. Block explains, his firm would have received one copy of transcripts from a hearing such as the one involving ConocoPhillips and made one copy for the client. Anyone who needed to see transcripts or exhibits would have had to obtain one of the paper copies. Now any number of authorized people can use the transcripts at once, even while travelling.
The extranet saves the client the trouble of developing its own system for keeping track of the documents, which are accessible at any time, Mr. Saundry says. "They can go on the extranet . . . at 12 o'clock at night if they want."
Although extranets work well for public hearings and court cases involving large amounts of documentation, law firms are also finding other uses for them.
Early this year, Borden Ladner Gervais set up an extranet for a large financial client. Selected executives at the institution can use it to review billing information and estimates for work by the law firm, says Allan Nielsen, another Calgary partner at Borden Ladner Gervais. They can also review files on long-term litigation, and have access to articles and presentations by Borden Ladner personnel that the firm thinks might interest them.
Although the term extranet properly applies to web-like networks that make information available outside an organization, the same material can also be made available within a firm. This is usually called an intranet or portal, and gives lawyers access to additional material clients don't see.
For instance, practice groups of lawyers working in the same area at Fraser Milner Casgrain share information on-line. Mr. Alleyne says Borden Ladner is developing a firm-wide network portal that will provide access to billing information, legal information databases and other material. Extranets will give clients access through this portal to selected information.
"The extranet view into the portal will allow the client to get at certain things that they need to see," he explains.
Of course, law firms don't want to give clients unrestricted access to all the information on their computers, nor do they want the outside world to have access to sensitive information they share electronically with clients.
Extranets require user names and passwords for access. Mr. Alleyne says his firm is careful to use individual IDs and passwords rather than letting clients share IDs among multiple employees, so that if someone leaves a client company, that person doesn't continue to have access to private data.
The firm is also experimenting with the use of digital certificates -- to provide more assurance than a password that the person logging on to a network is who he or she claims to be.
Although extranets are reasonably secure, Mr. Alleyne says, Borden Ladner Gervais is still cautious about what information is made available this way.
Mr. Saundry says Fraser Milner Casgrain discusses any concerns about sensitive material with its clients before posting anything on an extranet, and would not put documents on-line if the client was not comfortable. However, he says, "it's a very secure vehicle."
Mr. Fast says he is not worried about security. "It's not an easy target and it's a boring target." The website uses the same security Fortune 500 companies use, he says.
Mr. Saundry says clients in the oil and gas industry were among the first to show interest in using extranets to exchange information with their lawyers, but now the practice has spread to all kinds of clients, though mainly for cases involving large volumes of documents. Mr. Whitt says that, although most of the interest today comes from larger companies, he expects it to trickle down in time.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...ES/TPBusiness/
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Sex haters making progress stopping representational sex.
Legislation Undergirds Obscenity Prosecution, Protects Kids?
Bill Fancher, Rusty Pugh and Jody Brown
The U.S. Senate has decided it's time to give Attorney General John Ashcroft a little nudge when it comes to the issue of obscenity.
A resolution recently passed by the Senate would encourage the AG to make prosecutions of obscenity a priority. Senate Concurrent Resolution 77, passed unanimously by the chamber the Saturday before Thanksgiving, states simply that "it is the sense of Congress that the Federal obscenity laws should be vigorously enforced throughout the United States." Pat Trueman, who works with several pro-family organizations, explains the impetus behind the resolution.
"Morality in Media encouraged Congress to pass a resolution that encourages vigorous prosecution of illegal pornography because during the Clinton Administration nothing happened," Trueman says, "and unfortunately, so far in the Bush Administration, John Ashcroft has not had a good record of prosecuting obscenity either."
Trueman says the Senate resolution will assure Ashcroft that Congress is fully supporting any effort at going after obscenity and its purveyors. "This would not only alert Attorney General Ashcroft to do a better job, but it would support him as he moves forward to prosecute more and more individuals and companies," the pro-family advocate says.
Why is that support important? According to Trueman, the lack of such support leaves the Attorney General vulnerable to media attacks accusing him of being "a right-winger way out on the extreme" -- but with the concurrent resolution, Ashcroft is able to show he has the entire Senate behind him.
Trueman says a similar House resolution is being drafted as well. Pro-family activists have been very critical of Ashcroft, claiming he needs to do more to stem the tide of obscenity.
Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media (moralityinmedia.org), says enforcement of federal obscenity statutes will dispel two common notions found in American society today: that obscene materials no longer violate contemporary community standards in the U.S., and that obscenity is something that must be tolerated if Americans are to preserve their freedoms of speech and press.
"The lie that obscenity has become as mainstream and acceptable as apple pie is a 'siren song' that producers and distributors of hard-core pornography and their defenders love to sing," Peters says on his group's website. "Every American concerned about the floodtide of hard-core pornography pouring into our communities, homes, and children's minds -- especially through the Internet -- should be heartened by the passage [of this resolution]."
Peters adds that he believes most Americans are offended by the distribution of hard-core porn and prefer to live in a decent society, rather that in one that is shaped by pornographers.
Meanwhile, a leading children's protection advocate says steps need to be taken to help protect children from a vicious form of pornography trading -- one that is not affected by Internet filters.
Penny Nance, president of the Kids First Coalition (kidsfirstcoalition.org), says parental supervision and Internet filters are a good way to help protect children from pornographic websites. But she says action needs to be taken to stop peer-to-peer (P2P) file-transfer sites, which allow anyone to download any kind of video or audio file.
Nance's group is supporting House Bill 2885, the Protecting Kids from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act -- also known as the "P4 Bill." She says the legislation would require the Federal Trade Commission to enact safeguards that would enable parents to better protect their children from pedophiles who share sexual images of children and target children with graphic images.
Nance's organization is encouraging concerned parents to contact their congressional representatives and urge them to support the P4 Bill. Still, she says, parents are the first line of defense for their kids -- and she recommends that children not be allowed to stay alone in their room with Internet access.
http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1234347.html
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Adult film distributor wants children protected from adult film distributors.
Titan Wins A Motion To Dismiss In P2P Suit
Charles Farrar
Titan Media has won its bid to be removed from a peer-to-peer subpoena lawsuit by Pacific Bell Internet against the Recording Industry Association of America.
Federal judge Susan Illston handed down an order in the final week of November removing Titan's parent, IO Group, from the lawsuit, as well as co-defendant Media Sentry. Illston also moved the case to D.C. District Court, where PacBell and the RIAA are fighting over the same issue before a judge who recently ruled for the music industry in a similar case involving Verizon Online.
"We believe PacBell named Titan Media in this lawsuit in order to get a foothold in a Court where they hoped to get a more favorable ruling," said Titan general counsel Gill Sperlein in a formal statement. "We are pleased that the Court was able to see through Pacific Bell's smoke-and-mirror attempts to create a controversy where none existed."
Sperlein told AVN Online Titan thought above all that PacBell likely included them in the California filing to show they needed the original case to be decided in California and not Washington.
"PacBell wanted a different judge to look at the issues, because they know they're going to lose in D.C.,"" Sperlein said. "I think what made the difference is the court recognized that's what they were trying to do, and that these issues were able to be decided in the D.C. court. I think they tacked us on just so they could say they needed to be here in Northern California."
He called the Illston ruling a big win, not just for the RIAA, but for all small copyright holders like Titan, "who are being severely damaged by illegal file trading. We are a small company, we are not trying to change the world; we are just trying to protect our property and to protect children from being exposed to adult materials on file trading networks like KaZaA."
"There is no 'substantial controversy' between either [PacBell] and MediaSentry or [PacBell] and Titan of sufficient immediacy and reality to warrant the issuance of a declaratory judgment," Illston wrote in her ruling.
Titan vice president for marketing Keith Webb said in his own statement that PacBell "makes more money from adult material in a single month than we could ever hope to make in a lifetime of our business ... Let's be honest, most of [PacBell/]SBC's customers are not using DSL broadband service to download recipes or trade home movies; they are using it to illegally distribute and trade copyright-protected property, including adult materials."
http://www.avnonline.com/issues/2003...120403_1.shtml
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Group Floats Scheme To Pay For Online Music
Andy Sullivan
Internet users who copy music through "peer-to-peer" networks should pay a flat fee to compensate musicians and record labels whose songs they download, a technology trade group has proposed.
The proposal on Thursday by the Distributed Computing Industry Association is intended to nudge the popular peer-to-peer networks toward respectability and forge peace with the record labels that have hounded them and their users in court.
Under the proposal, peer-to-peer users would pay a flat monthly fee to the networks or Internet service providers, which would be divided up among the record labels and musicians whose songs were downloaded.
Music fans could eventually be charged small amounts for downloading individual songs, or pay slightly more for "channels" featuring one style of music.
DCIA chief executive Marty Lafferty said a $5 fee could generate $200 million per month for the ailing recording industry, which has seen CD sales plunge in the last several years due in part to the popularity of the peer-to-peer services.
"It's truly a band-aid to get it started," said Lafferty, who said DCIA developed the plan in consultation with record labels, Internet service providers and other interested parties despite several lawsuits pitting one group against another.
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America declined to comment. The RIAA in the past has said peer-to-peer networks should stop traffic in copyrighted works if they want to gain legitimacy.
DCIA's reputation could prove a stumbling block as many peer-to-peer companies see the trade group as a front organisation for Sharman Networks, which produces the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer software, and its partner Altnet, a digital-media company. Altnet is owned by Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc..
DCIA's first proposal, released in October, would have relied on Altnet's copy-protection technology to get users to pay for music.
One executive said the flat-fee system could work but that DCIA was simply trying to force other companies to use Altnet.
"There's always a hidden agenda with them," said Wayne Rosso, president of Optisoft SL, which makes the Blubster and Piolet peer-to-peer clients.
Lafferty said DCIA has added two more member companies, Digital Commerce, a peer-to-peer sports media company, and Claria Corp., which makes the controversial Gator advertising software. But he acknowledged that relations with the rest of the peer-to-peer industry were rocky.
"It's almost as if they view Kazaa with its much larger market share as threatening to them, much as some smaller software companies view Microsoft (Corp.)," he said.
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle...section= news
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RIAA Lawsuits Yield Mixed Results
John Borland
The recording industry this week claimed progress in a controversial legal campaign targeting individuals who use peer-to-peer networks, but its optimism appeared to clash with at least some of the evidence, which remains murky.
By some measures, usage of peer-to-peer software such as Kazaa has been cut in half since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced in late June that it would begin suing alleged file traders. The campaign to date has yielded 382 lawsuits and 220 settlements averaging close to $3,000 apiece. But by other measures, file swapping is hitting an all-time high.
Given contradictory and inconclusive data, reading the RIAA's progress is little more than a Rorschach test, analysts said.
"(The RIAA) gets to define success," said Eric Garland, chief executive officer of Big Champagne, a research company that tracks aggregate peer-to-peer network usage trends. "It's their campaign. They decide what their goals are, and they get to grade their own paper."
RIAA officials downplayed the significance of file-swapping data in assessing the 5-month-old campaign, relying instead on a poll showing an increase in awareness of the risks involved in the practice. Nevertheless, millions of people still appear to be trading copyrighted files in spite of those risks, suggesting the message is filtering through only slowly, if at all, in many file-swapping circles, particularly outside the United States.
"The good news is that the message is getting out," RIAA President Cary Sherman said. "I am really struck by how much awareness has increased. It has far exceeded our expectations."
From its first round of 261 lawsuits in September to Wednesday's announcement of a third round of 41 new suits, the media attention has helped drive home the RIAA's message that swapping copyrighted material is in fact illegal. As newly aware parents exert more scrutiny of their children's online actions, and as legal services such as Apple Computer's iTunes and Rhapsody gain more support, that message may have a long-term impact on Net users' behavior.
At the core of the RIAA's strategy has been the attempt to persuade as many people as possible to stop trading copyrighted files online. This appears to be working in at least some groups, but the evidence is mixed at best.
The best news from the RIAA's perspective comes from Nielsen NetRatings, which has shown a steady decline in Kazaa users from a peak of 7 million per week in June, when the RIAA first announced its intention to file lawsuits, to just 3.2 million per week in November.
Some have criticized the Nielsen data, noting that it's based only on home users in the United States, and is drawn from a panel of users who know they're being watched. That means that those particular users would be most likely to give up the use of Kazaa if they learned that what they were doing was potentially illegal, those critics say.
The NPD Group, another independent research firm, measures how many households acquire any digital music on their PCs during a given month. That figure dropped sharply from about 18 million in May to about 13 million in August and has held fairly steady since, said Russ Crupnick, NPD Group vice president. About 60 percent of that figure comes from file swapping, while the majority of the rest represents people creating their own MP3s from CDs, he said.
Only 1 percent to 2 percent of digital music on PCs was coming from authorized services like iTunes by the end of October, he added, but that number is expected to grow over time.
"Right now all the numbers are overwhelmingly reflecting what's going on in the peer-to-peer space," Crupnick said.
But there's also evidence that file swapping is growing overall, according to Big Champagne. The number of people on Kazaa's FastTrack network fell somewhat over the summer, but grew to an all-time high of 5.6 million simultaneous users in October, Garland said.
The RIAA's Sherman says there's no real way to know what's happening on the networks, and points to the growth in use of "legitimate" services like iTunes as a positive sign.
"We've said that we would not be measuring this by numbers of files traded or number of users online," Sherman said. "The ultimate success here is whether the legitimate online services are gaining traction. So far that has been a glowing success."
While none of the RIAA's suits has yet come to trial, the initial stages of the campaign has prompted a series of lawsuits that could have effects well beyond the issue of music downloading.
To learn the identities of the nearly 400 people sued so far, the RIAA took advantage of a unique provision of digital copyright law that allows a copyright holder to use court- backed subpoenas to identify anonymous Internet service provider (ISP) subscribers.
These subpoenas are virtually unique in American law, since they do not have to be approved by a judge before being issued, and are used before any actual court case has been filed.
Verizon Communications was the first ISP to challenge this strategy, but a Washington, D.C., court decided that the RIAA's plans were legal under current law. Now SBC Communications and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are separately challenging the RIAA subpoenas in Washington, D.C., and North Carolina courts.
ACLU attorney Aiden Fine said his group took on its most recent case, in which it is representing a University of North Carolina student, for reasons well beyond music downloading.
"This is not about copyright infringement," Fine said. "This is about ensuring that the constitutional right to due process is met, and that the First Amendment rights of individuals using Internet are protected. Those are core issues for our organization."
Ordinary consumer backlash has manifested in several ways. Various online calls for boycotts of RIAA-member labels have had little discernable effect on sales--indeed, for the past two months, year-to-year sales figures for CDs have been rising for the first time in several years, driven largely by releases from big-name artists such as Britney Spears and the Beatles.
A guerrilla stickering campaign from activist group Downhill Battle, however, has seen labels reading "Warning: Buying this CD supports lawsuits against families and children" show up in retail record stores.
Other copyright holder groups are sitting back and watching, studying both the backlash and the potential effects on the file-swapping networks.
Some media reports have indicated that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which has watched online movie trading climb sharply in 2003, has already decided to pursue a similar course of lawsuits. MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor said that's premature, however.
"We have no current plans to take actions against individuals," Taylor said. "But we're not ruling out any actions we can take to combat piracy."
The RIAA's Sherman said that his organization would continue pursuing individuals over the long term. The dollar amounts of settlements would likely go up as the campaign progressed, and the number of files needed to trigger a lawsuit would likely go down, he said.
"We think we're on the right path," Sherman said. "That doesn't mean that we've achieved what needs to get done."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5113188.html
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California Law Will Ban Recording Devices From Cinemas
Gary Gentile
Sneaking a camcorder into a movie theater will soon be a crime in California under a new law designed to protect both copyrights and the livelihoods of thousands of movie industry workers.
"This industry is the economic engine that moves this city," Police Chief William Bratton said at a City Hall press conference Thursday.
The new law, which takes effect Jan. 1, allows moviegoers to make a citizen's arrest if they see someone in a theater with a recording device. Signs will also be posted at all Los Angeles County theaters notifying patrons of the new law.
The effort is aimed mainly at camcorders, which account for 92 percent of all illegal copies of films that appear for sale over the Internet and are sold on street corners, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA is seeking to enact similar laws in other states and is backing an effort to make the illegal taping of a film a federal felony.
The law, which was signed by former Gov. Gray Davis, was written to also include future technologies and could be enforced against people recording all or parts of a film with a tape recorder, handheld computer or even a cell phone.
City and county law enforcement officers say they will respond to calls from theaters to assist in making the citizen's arrest if resources permit. People convicted under the law could be subject to a maximum one year in jail and a fine of $2,500.
"These thieves are stealing from Los Angeles and are stealing from American creativity," city attorney Rocky Delgadillo said Thursday.
Clutching a palm-sized camcorder in one hand, Delgadillo paraphrased the movie character "Dirty Harry," portrayed by actor Clint Eastwood. "If you carry one of these into a movie theater, you have to ask yourself, 'Do I feel lucky?'"
http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/nation/...-7538222c.html
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TunA Lets Users Fish for Music
Kari L. Dean
Forget the fad of accosting random strangers to jack your headphones into their iPods. That's so two weeks ago. The future of on-the-go peer-to-peer music sharing is already starting to groove in Ireland.
Media Lab Europe, research partner to MIT Media Lab, is testing tunA, a software application that employs Wi- Fi to locate nearby users, peek at their music playlist and wirelessly jack into their audio stream. Pronounced like the fish and signifying music "tunes" and "ad hoc" file sharing, tunA is being designed for wireless PDAs, cell phones and even its own hardware device.
"TunA alleviates the alienation of using a Walkman, and it makes it more of a social experience. You can listen to your music and still open yourself up to people around you," said research fellow Arianna Bassoli, who masterminded the project late last year after researching the way young people in Dublin interact -- or don't -- in public spaces.
Since February, Bassoli has dedicated herself to answering the question: Can anyone become a mobile radio station? Joined in July by computer engineer Julian Moore, another member of Media Lab Europe's Human Connectedness group, a working prototype implies the answer is yes. Their next step is to determine whether tunA can become a social experience.
"The main issue behind it was a way to connect people subtly, without being intrusive," said Bassoli. "And music is the way teenagers want to open themselves to people around them."
When alone, a tunA-enabled device functions like a regular MP3 player. But around others like it, the interface displays other in-range users, identified by the avatar of their choice. Avatars appear or disappear automatically as users go in and out of range.
Clicking on others' avatars lets you see whatever personal information or messages they want to share with the world. It also displays their playlist and the song they are listening to at that moment so you can decide if you want to tune in.
There's also instant-message capability, the possibility to change skins and a virtual stalking feature: You can bookmark not only songs, but also people.
"So even though the people around you might change, you can bookmark those you like, so next time you see them, (tunA) would notify you they're around," explained Bassoli. "Also, if there's a song that you don't you know, you can bookmark it so the next time someone nearby has it, you can ask them about it."
Bassoli's next step is observing tunA users' interactions at a small art college in Dublin.
"I am interested in the overlap between the virtual and real world," she said. "I think that since you know the people you are connecting with are nearby, it would get you curious about who they are (based on their music tastes).
"It's not like sharing music with someone far away on the Internet; you might actually want to meet these people."
Despite research sponsorship by Ericsson, however, Bassoli said tunA's path to commercialization is not necessarily immediate. Media Lab's contact at Ericsson was not available by press time to comment on the probability or timing of tunA appearing in one of its mobile phones. More importantly, however, Bassoli isn't sure how tunA would best work with mobile phones.
"What's nice about Wi-Fi is the peer-to-peer connection; it's completely decentralized," she said. "With wireless technology used now for mobile phones, it is more difficult because it is more centralized."
As for potential DMCA-violation concerns, Bassoli isn't worried at the moment. TunA isn't designed to provide downloading capability, and rogue software available to hijack music streams isn't much more sophisticated than a camcorder in a movie theater.
Technology pundit Andrew Orlowski, on the other hand, is more concerned that tunA does not have downloading capabilities.
"I'm not sure that a device that would allow streaming but wouldn't allow you to copy would be very popular," he said.
"I agree with the Cupertino strangler, I mean Steve Jobs. (He) said that there is a certain satisfaction that comes with completing the transaction."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,61427,00.html
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Time For A Data Transmission Summit
Andy Oram
In a widely circulated weblog, software designer Dave Winer has called on major Democratic presidential candidates to issue statements about current intellectual property battles. Winer is backed up by another weblog by noted law professor Lawrence Lessig. Their goal, which I and most other people in high-tech support, is to to "keep the Internet free of interference from the entertainment industry," as reflected in the DMCA and its harsh application, the anti-KaZaa lawsuits by the RIAA, the recent broadcast flag required by the FCC on digital reception and playback equipment, and so forth.
I would go further and say it's time for a broad-based but officially sanctioned summit on information transmission involving Congress, relevant agencies such as the FCC, technology leaders, and content providers. These would not be the stacked hearings and closed-door negotiations that usually drive policy in these areas, but a frank examination of what technological change is doing to our data. It would not be restricted to the field known as intellectual property. (The term is not really appropriate, of course, and technological change is making that more and more obvious as time goes on.)
Don't think that current IP battles are just large entertainment firms defending turf. We will all eventually be towed in by the deep currents that the content providers are struggling with now.
The plummeting cost and increasing ease of transmitting material changes everything about information. But policy got off on a bad footing back around 1995 in the first serious government examination of the issues, the notorious document "Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights," by Bruce Lehman and the Information Infrastructure Task Force. This report founded the original sin of digital policy, defining the movement of bits within a computer as a "copy" of a work and therefore as a copyright-infringing act.
Lehman's report essentially declared that the government's approach to protecting copyright holders' interests would be business as usual. The Clinton administration hereby set itself inexorably against the technological tide and committed itself to a philosophy totally out of touch with reality, a course that led to the dismal results we see today. And yet the doctrine of the infringing computer copy has spread throughout the world and is being urged by copyright holders on governments everywhere.
Similar defenses of business as usual have distorted policy in just about every other area of "intellectual property," including trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. While the World Intellectual Property Organization and its adherents claim to balance technological change with the interests of current big business, decisions always slant toward the latter.
But we must not lose all discernment in our fight against abuses by large intellectual property interests, because they are touching on to something that affects us all. The ease of storing and transmitting information that essentially takes on an eternal existence is a social issue that we all must face. One current manifestation of the problem is the recent decision by many health clubs to ban cell phones because some contain cameras that can catch members in compromising positions.
The spread of cameras, sensors, and wireless networks will lead to more such dilemmas that will make us wish we could sit down with the intellectual property interests and discuss what we all have in common. Too many people fall back on the oft-discredited but easy phrase "information wants to be free," which is no more appropriate to the situation than the "get over it" response to violations of privacy.
We can't stop the spread of information, but we can try to establish norms and ground rules for its use. We have to celebrate what we can achieve with the potent combinations of new technologies, but try to remain masters of them. And that is why it's high time for a summit.
Right now, we're in a battle where those with the most social and political power benefit at the expense of the rest of us. This means large corporations having free rein over information transfer where it benefits them, while they legally restrain its transfer where they sense a loss. A summit will necessarily have to raise questions of power, which are the questions powerful interests are most loath to address. We must push all the harder to make the issues explicit.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/2003/11/17#a651
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The Object of This Game: Sink the Music Pirates
Its makers say the computer game can teach kids about copyright laws.
Jon Healey
Hey, kids! Want to join the FBI and chase music pirates?
That would be the Funny Bureau of Investigations, and the chase would take place in the make-believe world of a computer game based loosely on Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island." But the underlying message is serious: Don't bootleg music.
The game is being developed by Music Games International, a privately held company in Cambridge, Mass., that is run by three emigres from the former Soviet Union, Igor Tkachenko, Roman Yakub and Alexander "Sasha" Gimpelson. "The Music Pirates Game," due out in the spring, will be the fourth interactive music title from the company.
Tkachenko, a concert pianist and composer, said MGI had set out to create a game about the yo-ho-ho kind of pirates. But when the trio started researching the topic of piracy, they were overwhelmed with information about music copyrights.
"It was a natural extension," he said.
Their goal is to persuade the Recording Industry Assn. of America to distribute the game free to schools and students across the country.
"We believe it's a great benefit to the RIAA," Gimpelson said.
RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said the group had not been approached by MGI, "but we welcome anyone's participation in the battle against piracy."
The RIAA has launched a few educational campaigns against illegal downloading. It is best known, however, for suing online file-sharing companies and the people who use them. Although the trade group has won several key court battles and collected several hundred thousand dollars from individual infringers, file-sharing networks continue to attract tens of millions of people around the globe, and CD sales continue to slide.
Unlike the RIAA, which has focused its educational efforts on college students, Tkachenko prefers to target young students who don't expect music to be free.
And the best way to deliver an anti-piracy message isn't to scare kids, he said, but to ridicule bootleggers.
So in MGI's game, only the bootleggers' ringleader is portrayed as evil. The rest of the pirates are "kids who love music, and they don't know better," he said.
P.J. McNealy, who tracks the video game industry for American Technology Research in San Francisco, said video games could be effective educational tools, "but we've seen more applications for multiplication and spelling than explaining copyright law." MGI's project is "a noble effort," he said, but it won't put a dent in piracy unless it's integrated into a larger campaign.
Gimpelson is hopeful nonetheless. In the face of rampant illegal downloading, he said, the choice for the music industry is clear.
"Either you can teach them now or sue them later," he said. "I don't think there's any other option."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology
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Pirated Movies Flourish Despite Security Measures
The more studios try to stifle bootlegging, the more technology works to undermine them.
Lorenza Muñoz and Jon Healey
Hollywood's all-out war against movie piracy is turning into a big-budget bomb, with illegal copies of virtually every new release — and even some films that have yet to debut in theaters — turning up on the Internet.
Sophisticated computer users currently can download pirated versions of titles ranging from "Bad Santa" to "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." While some of the versions are crude copies made by camcorders aimed at theater screens, a surprising number are nearly pristine transfers.
The abundance of bootlegs arrives just as the movie studios have launched their most aggressive campaign yet to protect their business from the rampant downloading that has plagued the record industry. As part of this antipiracy initiative, the studios have done everything from banning the distribution of free DVDs to awards voters to stationing security guards equipped with night-vision goggles inside Hollywood premieres to spot camcorder users.
The steps may have made some thievery more difficult, but overall, piracy appears to be up from previous years, when an avalanche of year-end awards DVDs and videos, or "screeners" as they are called, flooded the entertainment and media communities. In fact, the new security measures seem only to have emboldened some pirates.
The Motion Picture Assn. of America says that last year it found at least 163,000 Web sites offering pirated movies. The number is likely to go up to 200,000 sites by the end of the year, said Tom Temple, the association's director of worldwide Internet enforcement.
A major source of movies online is an underground network of groups that specialize in bootlegging films, piracy experts say. These "ripping crews" — which recruit members around the world to obtain, edit, transfer and store films — compete with each other to be the first to obtain a movie, the experts say. They frequently are assisted by people connected to the movie industry, whose numbers include cinema employees, workers at post-production houses and friends of Academy members.
Pirates usually copy a movie first by sneaking a digital camcorder into a movie theater, sometimes the very auditorium in which antipiracy public service announcements have just played before the feature attraction. These copies yield something less than DVD-quality results. After this version appears online, crews will continue to compete to deliver a true DVD- quality version before it is officially released to video stores.
Piracy-monitoring firms say the advancing technology of digital camcorders is yielding dramatic improvements in the earliest versions of pirated movies. Although these efforts vary, the best ones come close to the picture and sound quality of DVDs.
Mark Ishikawa, the chief executive of BayTSP, a Los Gatos firm that helps studios combat online piracy, said, "We have seen some copies of 'Finding Nemo' that look like they were DVDs, yet after forensics we determined they were camcorders." Said another antipiracy expert who asked not to be identified: "The quality of non-DVD screeners has increased so much in the past year, the DVD screener ban is too little, too late."
The crews store films on powerful computers connected to the Internet but not accessible to the public. But their movies quickly trickle down to places open to the Internet savvy, such as Internet chat rooms and news groups. They take pains to hide their identities and locations, and so far have remained outside the reach of federal enforcers and studio lawyers. The Justice Department has struck only a glancing blow against this type of piracy, prosecuting members of several so- called "warez" groups, loose confederations of online partners who concentrate on copying computer software and games.
Nevertheless, government agencies are paying attention. The FBI began investigating the unauthorized release to the New York Post of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ" two weeks ago; by the time that probe began, federal authorities already had launched a broader investigation into the unauthorized copying of numerous other first-run films, according to sources.
Adding to the magnitude of the problem is the fact that some of these bootleg copies are pirated from inside the entertainment industry itself.
Piracy from such an array of sources means that there now are more Internet movie offerings than at the world's largest megaplex. Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 1" is available in two versions, an American/European edition (with portions in black and white) and one in Japanese (all in color). Other titles available include "The Rundown," "Timeline," "21 Grams," "The Missing," "The Cat in the Hat," "Thirteen" and "Pieces of April."
The box-office hit "Elf" was available four days before its Nov. 7 release in theaters, taken from a digital camcorder recording made in a theater, with the sound most likely recorded from a cinema seat audio jack used by hearing- impaired moviegoers. Films not yet in theaters, including "Girl With a Pearl Earring" and "Monsieur Ibrahim," were taken from DVD screeners sent out in advance of the films' release.
As part of the campaign against movie piracy, the MPAA on Sept. 30 banned the seven major studios and their specialty film divisions from sending out free movies to anyone but the 5,800 Academy Awards voters. Oscar voters, furthermore, can only receive specially marked videocassettes and not DVDs, which provide better masters for bootlegs. The move infuriated the makers of lower-budget movies and less conventional fare, who feared the true motive for the ban was to bring Oscar attention back to big studio releases.
Movies from independent companies that are not part of the MPAA are turning up in a number of Internet sites. DVD copies of all of the movies being pushed for awards consideration by Lions Gate Films, for example, are available illegally online. Lions Gate began sending out screeners to an array of awards voters two weeks ago. The studio declined comment Wednesday.
The motion picture association's Temple said the main point of the ban was to delay the arrival of high-quality copies of movies online as long as possible. It's too early to tell the impact of the new rules, he said, because the studios have just started sending out screeners. But a few copies of DVD and VHS screeners have started to pop up online; for example, a VHS copy of United Artists' "Pieces of April" hit the Net on Thanksgiving.
The piracy expert who asked not to be named said the MPAA's action "has of course caused a shortage of real, true DVD screeners of movies" online. "But it doesn't matter because there are copies out there that are good enough…. Some of them even exceed the quality of VHS screeners."
Several other experts agreed that the new rules have had absolutely no effect on the availability of movies online.
"There's no difference," said Kevin Moylan, senior vice president of the antipiracy firm Vidius Inc. of Beverly Hills. "The thing to remember is that all it takes is one copy. So even an authorized screener, one of them is going to perpetrate a leak."
The MPAA ban is now at the center of a lawsuit in New York, where on Wednesday a federal judge heard a full day of testimony on a challenge by a group of independent filmmakers to the screener edict. MPAA President Jack Valenti testified that the prohibitions were necessary to combat the illegal copying and sale of videotapes and DVDs.
But two independent film producers who are among the plaintiffs in the case testified that the distribution of screeners is essential to their strategy of marketing independent films based on good reviews, word of mouth, mentions on critics' Top 10 lists and, eventually, awards nominations.
"The hardest thing with my movies is getting people to see them…. [It's] not that people would want to steal them," said producer Ted Hope, who has prize aspirations for two films this year, "American Splendor" and "21 Grams."
He and fellow indie producer Jeff Levy-Hinte, who has similar hopes for his film "Thirteen," told the judge that the major studios would have a big advantage if lower-budget films like theirs cannot send thousands of copies to opinion-makers and voters who may never see the works in theaters.
The organization's vice president supervising its anti- piracy efforts, former FBI agent Kenneth Jacobson, later told the judge that the film studios were trying to avoid what happened in the music industry, in which illegal Internet downloading is widely seen as cutting sharply into sales.
Authorities around the world already have seized "35 million [illegally copied movies] so far this year," Jacobson testified, adding that film piracy has become so rampant in countries such as China, Russia and Pakistan that the legal markets there have all but evaporated.
Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, who has used promotion campaigns to gain multiple Oscars for films such as "Shakespeare in Love," submitted a declaration stating that "a successful awards season can make the difference between a movie grossing $5 million at the box office and a movie grossing $20 million."
U.S. District Judge Michael B. Mukasey said he will rule Friday whether to grant a temporary restraining order barring the MPAA from carrying out the ban.
The MPAA and California law enforcement officials plan to announce today how they will enforce a new state law barring the illegal recording of motion pictures in movie theaters. Similar federal legislation has been proposed.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology
Until next week,
-
js.
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Current Week In Review.
Recent WIRs -
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=18030 November 29th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17982 November 22nd
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17925 November 15th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17877 November 8th
Jack Spratt’s Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.